The Orchard-Keeper

Autumn had turned the orchard plain gold and brown, the road running straight between rows of trees hung heavy with fruit gone soft in the last of the season's warmth. The wayfarer had walked since morning on little more than water, and the branches nearest the road hung low enough to reach without leaving the road at all.

One apple, then a second, eaten standing, juice on the wrist before the third bite. It was only on reaching for a fourth that the wayfarer saw a woman standing two rows back with a ladder over one shoulder, watching plainly, not hiding it.

The fourth apple went heavy in the hand before it reached the mouth.

"I didn't know whose it was," the wayfarer said. "I would have asked."

"You couldn't have asked. Nobody's out here to ask." The Orchard-Keeper set the ladder down against the nearest tree. "That row and the one behind it are planted for the road. Anyone walking through eats free, and eats plenty, and nobody stands over them to be thanked for it. Finish the one in your hand."

"And if I hadn't seen you?"

"You'd have eaten the same apple." She said it as fact, not comfort. "The rows past that ditch are a different matter. Those feed the winter and pay what's owed on the land, and a hand in those rows without asking first is a different kind of hand, whoever it belongs to."

The wayfarer finished the fourth apple slowly, standing in the road with the juice cooling on the wrist.

There was work to be done before the light went, and the wayfarer fell in alongside it without being asked twice: a row of new saplings, thin as broom handles, their roots balled in sacking gone stiff with mud, waiting bundled by the ditch to be set into holes already dug. The Orchard-Keeper worked down the row with a spade and a bucket of water, and the wayfarer held each sapling steady while the soil went back in around the roots. The holes had been dug days ahead and half of them held rainwater, and each sapling got a bucketful anyway, poured slow at the stem while the ground drank it down and settled and asked for more.

"These won't bear for years," the wayfarer said, working a sapling upright.

"Longer than that. I won't see fruit off this row, most likely, unless I'm luckier with my own years than most people are." The Orchard-Keeper firmed the soil with her boot heel, not looking up. "The wood they're grafted onto came off a tree two rows over, and that one came off rootstock set out by a hand I never met. Somebody who knew him told me which tree it was, once, and that's the whole of what I know about him."

"That's a long time to wait for an apple."

"It's not waiting. The row gets planted because a row of that age dies out eventually and the ground wants trees in it." She moved the bucket down to the next hole. "Hold this one straight, it leans."

They worked the row to its end as the light dropped low and orange across the plain, the last saplings going in by feel more than sight. When the wayfarer's pack was opened for the map at the day's stop, the sheet showed the orchard plain with a single row along the road, thin and old, nothing like the two full rows standing there now.

The charcoal marked in a second row next to the first, small and plain.

The Orchard-Keeper glanced at the mark without much interest and went back to coiling the empty water bucket's rope.

She hefted the ladder onto her shoulder and walked on down the row, and the wayfarer picked up the empty bucket and followed, because there was still light enough for one more hole.

This is a teaching-story. It happened nowhere, and it happens all the time.